Quick Guide to Bash Shell Scripting

Oct 30, 2009 - 2 Comments

mac terminal Shell scripting is wildly useful and a powerful way to manipulate a lot of files and to automate behind-the-scenes tasks in Mac OS X. This guide is intended for Linux users but the Bash shell is also used in Mac OS X, and as far as I can tell everything in this bash shell scripting guide works the same across the two platforms. Before checking out the guide you might want to check what shell you are using in Mac OS X by typing the following in the Mac Terminal:

echo $SHELL

Something like /bin/bash or /bin/tcsh will be reported back to you, obviously this Bash scripting guide only works for the Bash shell. If you need to, you can change the default shell rather easily in the Terminal preferences, but Bash has been the default shell since 10.3 and continues to be in Snow Leopard.

LinuxHelp: 10 second guide to Bash Shell Scripting

If you’re looking for more, a much more advanced and complete guide to Bash scripting is available here:

Advanced Bash Scripting Guide

And if you really want to dive into shell scripting, a good book like Pro Bash Programming: Scripting the GNU/Linux Shell will do you wonders.

Related articles:

Posted by: Bill Ellis in Command Line, Development, Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks

2 Comments

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  1. Woodgie says:

    Not to mention the O’Reilly book “Learning the Bash shell” by Cameron Newham.

  2. Starkoman says:

    This nonsense makes me sick.

    The whole point of the Apple GUI was to avoid this stuff.

    Explain, please, how learning Terminal/UNIX/Linux commands are required — and then explain (please) why one has to learn this very difficult stuff instead of providing a nice GUI.

    Most of us chose Apple in previous decades because we could work with design and pre-press rather than get involved in computing. A little help would be much appreciated. Thank you all.

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